Tommaso Parrinello (ESA, Italy); Pierre Féménias (ESA, Italy)

Launched in 2010, the polar-orbiting ESA Earth-Explorer CryoSat Mission is the first SAR/SARin altimeter concept to be flown on Earth, specifically designed to measure the changes in the thickness of sea-ice and the elevation of the ice sheets and mountain glaciers. Going beyond and above its ice-monitoring objective, CryoSat is also a valuable source of data for the oceanographic community. To enable their full scientific and operational exploitation, the CryoSat ice and ocean products have to meet the highest performance, through regular processing algorithm upgrades. In this respect, the operational data need to be thoroughly quality-controlled and validated, via science-oriented diagnostics, robust statistics and comparisons with external measurements. Based on the outcomes from these analyses and the feedback from the Scientific Community, the data products continuously evolve in order to accommodate a wide range of users over the Sea ice, the Land Ice and the Ocean domains. The main objectives of this paper are to give an overview of the CryoSat data quality status and detailed the expected improvements from future processing Baselines.